Women's skin ages faster than men's: study

Women's skin ages faster than men's: study

October 3, 2006 05:21:54 PM PST




Women's skin ages faster than men's, according to a German study using a new laser-based technique to measure damage from sun exposure and aging.

The study, published in Optics Letters, a journal of the Optical Society of America, was based on a new technique in which doctors shine pulses of infrared laser light to look at the deeper layers of the skin and measure aging.

The imaging of collagen and elastin, whose degeneration causes wrinkles and loss of smoothness, found that women lose collagen faster than men.

"The dependence appeared to be sex-dependent, with women's skin losing collagen at faster rates than men's," according to the researchers from Germany's Freidrich Schiller University in Jena and the Fraunhofer Institute of Biomedical Technology in St. Ingbert.

Collagens are a group of proteins in the dermis, the connective tissue layer of the skin, and are responsible for the strength of skin. The human body makes a lot of collagen in youth but production declines with aging.

Currently, dermatologists who want to examine a patient's collagen network in the dermis have to remove a sample of tissue and look at it under a microscope. Authors of the study said this new non-invasive test might one day help in testing anti-aging cosmetic products as well as in the study of skin diseases that affect the collagen structure.


http://health.yahoo.com/news/167313

 

yeah, but women mature much faster then men. when a guy is a senior in highschool (like me) he is apparently at the same maturity level as a freshmen girl. haha. grrrrrreat.

 

yeah, um, that's pretty much bs, an urban myth that's perpetuated all the time. I don't recall hearing any credible studies saying that any gender is more mature than the other.

 

I thought that everything aged at the same rate, 1 day every 24 hours.

 

^ hahaha you may be right!

funny because women are the ones vain enough to spend hours sunbathing/on sunbeds... not really helping, is it?

 

Girls who think they're 'mature' and hang out with older guys might as well be known as 'easy prey'

 

I want a sex change then!

 

I think alot of scientific studies are bullshit. Alot of them contradict themselves and are the source of various prejudice.

 

Well, this is only a single study. Once it has been replicated a few hundred times, we will see if its results are supported.

 

white women in general have thinner, finer skin. then most of them deliberately set out to age it by coating it with makeup and tanning it to be pretty. not really all that mysterious.

 

when you also factor in all the soaps and astringents and garbage so many women buy into to "even their skin tone" and prevent pimples, etc, you've got a recipe for wrinkles. leeching all the oils from your skin in order to have a clear complexion, then putting stuff on your face to replace the natural oils you just leeched out, it's craziness.

 

i think this study is merely referring to rate of collagen losses - not any outside factors, such as how you treat your skin.

 

could be, though abuse of your skin ages it as well. sun damage, environmental damage, all that contributes to the aging rate.

 

definitely - probably WAY more than this theorized innate difference between men and women's skin!

 

well, aside from some basic biological factors, i think what women DO to their skin is much worse than what they start out with.